Free Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda by Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister Page A

another era he might have been a hippy. Reid was a petty criminal and Muslim convert, and he always looked like he needed a decent meal.
    It was clear that Reid was in awe of Moussaoui. He attached himself to our group but said little; he seemed lonely. I lost contact with bothmen late in 1999 and thought little more of them, especially Reid – who seemed weak, impressionable. There were rumours that they had gone to Afghanistan – and I wondered whether the two of them had trained with al-Qaeda. Even so, I was stunned when their names and faces were splashed on television and newspapers two years later.
    Moussaoui would be arrested shortly before 9/11 in Minnesota. He had entered the United States to get flying lessons, and would soon become known as the ‘twentieth hijacker’ . Reid would board a flight from Paris to Miami on 22 December 2001 with explosive powder hidden in his shoes. Restrained by flight attendants and passengers as he tried to light fuses hidden in his shoes, he would become known as the ‘shoe-bomber’ .
    As my associations with radical Islamists expanded, I was often surprised by who among them crossed the Rubicon from talk to terror. They were rarely the obvious ones. But it was clear even in 1999 that London – and especially the mosque at Finsbury Park – was becoming the clearing-house for dozens of militants intent on acts of terrorism. And they often had similar backgrounds: with difficult or violent childhoods, little education and few prospects; unemployed, unmarried and seething with resentments.
    Aware of the militant rhetoric emerging from places like the Finsbury Park mosque, the British security services were beginning to pay more attention to London’s jihadist scene. But like many Western agencies they seemed to be playing catch-up, trying to grasp the extent of the problem, find out more about the leading lights, travel and funding, the rivalries among radical circles. Brixton and Finsbury Park became the battlegrounds for Londonistan, pitching the pro-Saudi Salafis like old Tayyib against a generation of angry jihadis that wanted to bring down the Saudi royal family, fight the Russians in Chechnya and purify the Muslim world of Western influences.
    For my own part, books, lectures and conversations late into the night all helped prod me towards support for jihad, for taking up arms to defend the faith. I could not understand why the imams of most London mosques, including Abdul Baker at Brixton, studiously avoided mention of jihad let alone issue fatwas, commands to action. In Dammaj the duty of jihad as part of our religion had been our daily fare.
    In the dying days of 1999 I went to a lecture in Luton, a town north of London, by Shaikh Yahya al-Hajuri, one of the teachers at Dammaj. He was surprised to see me.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me as I greeted him afterwards. ‘You are supposed to be back in Yemen.’
    I was taken aback by his tone. Had I abandoned the true path? Was my faith being adulterated in Europe? I went home and prayed for guidance, for a sign from Allah that I should return to what in many ways was the cradle of my devotion.
    It came on a Friday morning just weeks later. I had dropped into the basement kitchen at the Regent’s Park mosque for a cheap meal. A dark-skinned woman approached me, looking anxious.
    ‘Brother, please can you come to help my husband. He wants to pray but he can’t walk from the car.’
    I went upstairs with her. The couple were from Mauritius. Her elderly husband looked so fragile that I thought to move him might break him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of an ancient Mercedes.
    ‘I’m all right, brother,’ he said. ‘I just need to rest and get my breath back.’
    I picked up an inhaler from the floor of the car. But he only became paler; it was almost as if he were vanishing before my eyes. His breathing became laboured, a quiet heaving scarcely audible amid the rush of traffic. His eyes closed and he